Scareware firms settle with FTC
June 26th, 2009 joshua
Two “scareware” firms have settled fraud charges with the Federal Trade Commission.
Rather than pay nearly $2 million in fines, defendants James Reno and ByteHosting Internet Services LLC have agreed to forfeit more than $116,000 in revenues they got illegally from consumers over the Web.
The firm in question scammed Web surfers by offering a “free” scan of their hard drives and then claimed to find an undetermined amount of viruses, spyware and pornography on the computer. The scan would then offer consumers programs like WinFixer, WinAntivirus, DriveCleaner, XP Antivirus and others to rid the computers of the problem. These really just added more trouble to hard drives, and didn’t remove anything.
The FTC previously ordered these defendants from making this claim in 2008 and received an injunction to shut them down.
Regulators say they settled the original charges because the defendants could not afford to pay back their customers.
